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On a completely unrelated note, thanks for "liking" a status of mine of MFP, I need a kick in the pants to watch what I eat again. I lost the weight I wanted to and then stopped paying attention to what I was eating for the last month or two with the results that you'd expect.  Good luck in your interview. San Diego is beautiful, I've been there a few times for conferences and the weather is absolutely perfect there.
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May 14, 2015 19:08
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Check out SWAN (statewide adoption agency) if you have them in NV, that's who they work for. Appears it's a PA-agency. Maybe there is a NV equivilent.
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May 18, 2015 19:17
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Knyteguy posted:If all of this could be done from Reno then I would do it, but I'm concerned that we can't make the money for priority #1 here. I think that's why I want so badly for this San Diego job to work out. Among other things too. Plus like I've already got it. Bird in hand and all that. If only you were in a field where it was possible to work in one location where the job is in another. LOOK FOR REMOTE WORK. If you end up not accepting this SD position (which I'm in the camp that I think it's not the best idea), tell your recruiter you're only interested in remote work over $90k.
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May 27, 2015 13:18
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Even though it's 2 hours from DC (assuming not rush hour times), you may be surprised at some of the CoL. My friends lived in Leesburg (about 1.5hr to DC with traffic) for a while, and daycare for one kid was going to be like $2k/mo or some ridiculous poo poo. I think I remember you saying this was more rural VA, though so who knows. Do you WANT to move to VA for a modest/no raise (I only say modest because it's unlikely that your wife would find work right away)? Can you try and pick up some freelance work to supplement your income now and get better experience to eventually leapfrog into a big boy developer position in a couple of years?
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Jun 16, 2015 17:51
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The health insurance seems pretty crappy, but it might be the norm I guess? If I'm reading that right your health insurance would cost $448.29 per pay if your whole family was covered. If I further understand, you are given up to $235.38 per pay towards that. So you'd be paying $212.91 per pay pre-tax for a high deductible insurance plan. I have no idea what you guys are paying now, but that's probably $350/mo post tax eaten by health insurance. Seems high, but again I'm not sure what is normal for the private sector. e: Another thing about the health insurance, which may be obvious to everyone else, but we just moved to a "Qualified High Deductible Plan with HSA" here at work and gone are the days of copays for office visits and stuff. You get to pay the whole bill, and only when you hit your deductible do you get a break. That was a big eye opener for me, I've been with my employer 13 years and have probably been to the Dr. 5 times. But if I go now because I have the flu, I get to pay for the office visit out of pocket ($??? $150? $180?) and then get to pay for any prescription meds at full retail too. Fuckin' health insurance. I want to be a socialist, just tax my paycheck bro. dreesemonkey fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Jul 9, 2015 |
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Jul 9, 2015 20:42
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The company in SD basically said that they made a decision to not hire for that position (that would be mostly internal, non-billable stuff) because they made a similar hire previously and they didn't want another non-delivering staff person on hand at the moment. So it was pretty much a dropped ball on their part.
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Jul 10, 2015 13:00
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Cicero posted:Programming on just a laptop is pretty painful, in my experience. Having multiple screens is an enormous help. Yea all depends on the kind of work. If I'm firing off emails, sure. But for development even my two screens at work is kind of lacking. Kg I'm under my calorie goal today for the first time in weeks, I'm here to help keep you accountable.
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Jul 28, 2015 22:56
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dreesemonkey posted:I know this is from a few pages ago, but man. Interest: Not even once. Quotein' from many pages ago Man interest sucks if you're the one paying it.
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Aug 6, 2015 21:16
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Knyteguy posted:Correct. Much of that financed amount is negative equity. Our car has a few ~fancy~ options though, so it was a little more than $17,000. I did a KBB on it yesterday and it's still worth over $15,000. At least it's holding its value well. This can also be a curse. Lightly used Subaru's and Honda's (at least around here) are close enough to the same price as new that I would argue you should just buy new for a couple thousand more for full warranty and knowing the entire history of the car. Many cars are not like this though, your corolla has the "yay toyota" thing going for it, but it also was the most dated car in the class for a number of years, so the competition was more desirable to a point.
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Aug 7, 2015 17:01
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Some cute kids up in this thread! Here's my 9-month daughter I'm not sure I like the sounds of your job security at the moment, KG. I guess it would be alright if you got absorbed into the main company and you could work remotely since that's exactly what you do now and the security of a company that can make payroll is tempting. It just kind of sucks, I hate for you to start the manic relocation chicken-with-head-cutoff-train all over again. Not sure how tempting the startup thing sounds, to be honest. If it's not a lot of work I would consider at maybe like a "percentage of shares in startup that could be bought-out by your boss at 150% actual value" or something.
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Aug 25, 2015 15:48
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RIP Paul Walker posted:No. I'll concur with this. It's not really a good choice for a car, but if he can make it work (I'm guessing the car seat goes in the front seat) then whatever. I don't think it's worth right now just to look for another car at this point. Just keep in mind KG that the money you're going to pour into this maintenance-wise, you're not going to get back when you re-sell. So unless you're dead set on keeping this thing long-term, I wouldn't go too crazy with fixing it up other than necessities.
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Sep 25, 2015 16:42
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I've got a way shittier version of this kind of child carrier I got at a yardsale for $2 and my daughter and I both love it. She loves being "up and around" and I have hands free to do whatever. Often she's perfectly content with me just doing normal household chores type stuff or going for a walk or playing outside with my son. We also had one of those front baby bjorn things and it was ok but much much less comfortable to wear. Check craigslist or local facebook groups and you can probably get a good deal on one of the hiking type carriers if that's what you're looking for. Now that I have one I'd probably pay $100 for one knowing how useful it is, but I can't justify buying a nicer one when the $2 one is perfectly serviceable (though the padding could be better).
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Oct 1, 2015 21:05
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KG if YNAB is confusing you, write a parser and have it summarize your data for you. According to a post on their forums, all the YNAB data is XML/JSON which should be pretty easy to manipulate in .NET I get a much better understanding of something when I have to program it to make it work. In an example from work, I have a fairly complex report that has to take a lot of different things into consideration. When the report is processing and I'm looping through those things I need to account for, if I see something that would in effect "overwrite" the data due to one of these exceptions, I have it write out an alert saying "Hey it looks like this person might XYZ due to such and such data". You could do something similar to humanize your budget "Hey shitface this is the 3rd month in a row you've been over in groceries" or something along those lines to look for trends or just to sift through your data. FWIW YNAB has it's employees work anywhere from home  Janus Owl posted:I hate spending my discretionary on food. I think this happens a lot because KG and I will be like, "hey doesn't X sound good?" and then we'll go to the store and get it. We have both talked about how much we'd rather spend our discretionary on hobbies or things that would actually bring us joy; then we get an idea about something that sounds good, and we buy it. I think the best thing we could do to counteract this behavior would be to think about it when we get these cravings. These are small scale impulses that add up in a big way, and keep us from saving for important purchases. I'm glad you asked about that because writing that just now clarified my thought process when going to the mini mart; which is almost no thought past instant food gratification. Janus, just wanted to say I understand about getting away from being hands on with the budget. My wife and I have struggled with that as well, the past few months we've deliberately did the budget together and we've only been over in any category a couple of times. It's been wildly successful. You guys are both in this together, and while you may have the same ultimate goals, you both need to be involved. My wife has always been "Yea I'm fine with whatever, you handle it" which sounds great, but then she doesn't check the budget to see what we have planned. Doing the budget together has helped tremendously. Planning is absolutely key, it's not always easy but it's necessary. We start with the things that basically don't change each month, those are easy. Then we go to "what do we have going on this month?" That would include birthdays (+$ to "Gifts") or plans with friends (+$ to "Fun with friends", +$ to "Entertaining") or going to visit our parents (+$ to Fuel) or taking the kids to the zoo (+$ to "Kids entertainment"), etc. Historically I've been pretty frugal / cheap and not willing to spend money. Since we've been using YNAB and we're spending to a plan, I'm much more lax about spending money. It all boils down to the plan, I don't mind spending money if we've planned for it.
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Oct 6, 2015 14:01
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Bugamol posted:Time and time and time and time and time again you prove yourself to have the mentality of "throw money at the problem". Just wanted to say that I agree with this. KG I get that you're stressed / depressed. I really think if you start making some progress here and there you'll be able to turn things around. I would recommend two things specifically: 1. Make an effort to take walks, either at work or with your family or both. This gives you time to think, is good for you, and best of all free. 2. You and your wife need to plan plan plan plan your budget. You both need to be a part of it to keep each other accountable. You NEED to stop assuming $XYZ should be enough for gifts or pets or whatever. Be detailed and thorough. If you make an effort on either of these things and it starts to click, you're going to feel much more in control, your mood will improve and you will be much less stressed. You have to make an effort.
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Oct 13, 2015 21:30
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Knyteguy posted:We're now insured again. I've been looking for a therapist who specializes in finances. I really do think though that if you and Janus planned your budget/meals/family activities better your anxiety / frustration / depression surrounding your finances would be all but gone. Personally, I think the best part of being "good with money", aside from looking down my nose at the paycheck-to-paycheck pleebs (I'm at least half kidding), is the stress reduction about bills and/or unforeseen costs. Your "luxury" purchases are not planned for (2nd car, weights, occulus, 1.5 new PCs), so you buy them anyway and then have to play the budget switcharoo shell game to try and squeeze it into your budget. Which then stresses you out and makes you feel like you don't have control. Not planned for does not mean "we've been talking about this for a while", it means "we've been talking about this for a while and have been saving towards that and we have the money for it". This counts for pretty much all purchases, big or small. We had a 3-paycheck month last month and since we're living a month ahead we've been making lists of things we would like to get with the "extra" money. That goes from saving $1000 towards a bathroom remodel to something as stupid as "I want to buy some storage bins" or "I like this sweatshirt". Hell, we've started saving for our 10 year anniversary trip that, at the time, was 4 years away yet. PLANNING. PLANNING. PLANNING. PLANNING. PLANNING. PLANNING. PLANNING. PLANNING. PLANNING.  PLANNING. PLANNING. PLANNING. PLANNING. PLANNING. PLANNING. PLANNING. PLANNING. PLANNING. I think this thread is mostly a curse, since it's going to be a huge stressor. I'd like to see you still keep it open, and like you said, just read/respond less. The BFC crew can be overly critical and harsh, but the overlying advice of everyone to "Save your money to buy things you want" is still valid, all hyperbole/hurtful words aside.
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Nov 6, 2015 19:40
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Knyteguy posted:So when you get that money from a three paycheck month you do something different with it sometimes? Yes. Since we're a month ahead in YNAB and all of our "normal" spending is accounted for in our typical monthly budget (you've got my YNAB data, you can check out our subcategories), anytime we get anything more than our 4 paychecks per month, we can decide whatever the hell to do with it. This is the first time in my life that I felt like a 3 paycheck month actually even mattered, I'd always find a way to spend it before. Knyteguy posted:Also you have a baby right? How do you plan for your food and stuff? I feel like we're so stressed for time between all of the stuff that comes with a baby (watching, feeding, taking to get them pictures with my grandma, picking them up, visiting relatives, getting them ready), that we just struggle so much with trying to plan meals and deal with the cleanup of them. We picked up enough meals for dinner and lunches for the next 2 weeks or so, but it was still done on the fly minus a meal or two. I'm sure you can relate to this: sometimes we spend all of an hour together before heading off to bed. We did cook for 3 weeks straight in October, but I feel like we had more time then. I dunno. I'm not going to lie, kids are hard. We have a daughter who turns one next Wednesday and a 4 year old son. With two kids, the wife and I are rarely around each other. We're very often "I've got this one, you get that one" or "I have the kids, you make dinner" or whatever. There is no easy answer. Even when both the kids are in bed, we usually do our own thing because there's poo poo to do and that's our only free time. Meal planning is hard for us, but it's also gotten a little better now that our daughter is on real people food (you guys shouldn't be too far behind). But if we spend half an hour a month planning meals or the following month, it helps. Knyteguy posted:How do you define a luxury purchase? I don't really feel like we need anything else at this point. I've cut down video game expenses this year to basically nil, and we've been trying to find hobbies that we can do pretty cheaply. Would weights or a gym be luxury? I consider it a necessity. Same with the second car. Like we want a new couch but I'd consider that a luxury purchase. Oculus I just wanted to try to make money... I wanted to create a virtual reality drum tutor gamified like Rock Band. I mean there's undoubtedly money there. A luxury purchase would be just about anything we don't need, but would like to have. I would definitely consider weights/gym membership a luxury. You can get in better shape eating better and walking or running basically for free. You could do bodyweight exercises for some sort of strength training. Another thing that's extremely helpful about planning/savings for wants is you might change your mind. Once you have the $300 for a weight bench and olympic weights you may realize that you don't want them as much as you thought you did. I gave a few examples in my post but for this month we had some luxuries planned for: - Wife wanted a particular sweatshirt - I want some carhartt overalls for winter/snow - We want new sheets for the bed and new towels - I wanted to get a bunch of storage bins - Wife wanted to send some diapers to a friend who just had a baby - Send flowers to my sister having surgery Things like videogames (I just bought GTAV for PC last month) come out of my discretionary money. Luxuries like those above would be things we would both decide that were worthy buys for one way or another, but if it's not, it's typically going to be from discretionary spending. As for the oculus, as good of an idea as it sounds, do you really have the time to dedicate to a huge project like that? If you're struggling to plan meals and spend time with your wife, you're not going to realistically throw in another 20 hour a week project in there.
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Nov 6, 2015 20:29
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Knyteguy posted:
Get back on MFP. Baby aside, I'm going to assume you're eating poorly since you're not logging on MFP anymore. I immediately notice poor sleeping / energy when I'm eating like garbage. It's like night and day. Give it a shot.
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Jan 12, 2016 03:37
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Local government worker checking in  Top vacation / bottom sick time. I also have two personal days I can use. 
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Jan 21, 2016 20:28
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Another reason you shouldn't even be remotely considering buying a house, if you're not planning on staying in the area for >5 years (aka: "Boy it would be nice to move to seattle / silicon valley to improve my career") you're completely screwing the pooch on closing costs wasted.
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Feb 23, 2016 18:42
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Knyteguy posted:My hidden categories is cut off, but I was too lazy to fight MSPaint just for that when you can see the values. I use a program called Snag It for screenshots usually, but I don't have that at home. That's why my screenshots are weird this time. Since nYNAB is browser-based, you could use the imgur extension for chrome/whatever and screenshot the entire page with like two clicks. right click > imgur > capture page to > whatever I've said it in the past, but the "big bucket" categories worry me. It makes the money a little more abstract and makes planning for upcoming costs harder, at least that's how it works for me. I like very much seeing our savings goals broken down, not a "big pile of cash free for all". I'm not saying this can't work for you, but I could see how it may not help all that much. Planning every-freaking-thing is the biggest and most important part of money-stress-reduction for me.
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Feb 24, 2016 19:22
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KG, how's your son doing?
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Mar 2, 2016 16:19
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Knyteguy posted:I've tried, but she's "afraid of touching my computer". Plex wise - I don't want my mechanical components to degrade by keeping the thing running 24/7 (plus we're probably talking +$20-30/mo to the power bill with my components, just based on the difference between not turning off my old PC vs turning it off when comparing the power bill). Plus it would be like a constant heater. A dedicated low-power (<100 watts) would be cheaper even with the up front cost. I can probably use it in the interim though, as long as I don't try to set it up like I would a real server. At idle/serving plex your PC probably isn't consuming more than 100 watts. What are you running in your PC? I recently got a refurb dell optiplex i3 system to turn into my plex / development server. Very happy with it for ~$180. It was a complete hobby purchase, however, and doesn't really improve my life at all. It's actually been a lot of work ripping my physical media.
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Mar 4, 2016 20:21
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The biggest effect on my sleep is when I eat good and get some sort of exercise during the day. Both of those things are free, one of them is not easy, however.
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Apr 10, 2016 23:23
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Knyteguy posted:Which one? I find eating good harder than exercising. Yea, eating good is hard for me. Not snacking/gluttoning after dinner helps me sleep better and cures my acid reflux.
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Apr 11, 2016 13:07
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BarbarianElephant posted:Eating better != counting calories. You are on a financial diet, which you find hard enough to stick to. Eat better by cutting down on junk food, sugared drinks etc and eating more vegetables and home-cooked meals. You don't need to go "all in" on something to get a benefit from it. You are right, doing some simple things like that will help but if you're not getting the whole picture of what your normal everyday eating is now, it's hard to get a handle on just how good/bad you're doing. In a way eating well (in a calories in/calories out sense) is way harder than finances because at least with buying stuff you have a number associated with the action, you may decide "technically I have enough money to buy this PS4 that is $400 even though I shouldn't". There isn't really a body overdraft protection physically limiting from eating more food than you need (within reason). You could eat a salad for lunch and dinner with a modest breakfast and destroy your diet by getting a 800 calorie iced sugar coffee thing all the while thinking, well I earned this, I only ate salads today! Eating sucks.
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Apr 11, 2016 20:04
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KG, I don't think your hosting business is a bad idea, but I think maybe it's the wrong idea right now. You're a programmer, you should be able to find some small freelance coding projects. Granted, you're going to have a ton of competition if you're doing elance/odesk stuff, but if you can score a few jobs and do good work you can probably make some decent side money. I did this for a while (pre-kids) and way way way undercharged, but it was easy money for me and it was neat learning new use cases instead of the same old same old stuff from my day job. I feel like I've developed some nice relationships with these people, and some side money made me care a little less about feeling undervalued at my day job. My first ever freelance client actually just contacted me last week to make an addition to his database he's been using to manage his project management / billing since 2008.
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Apr 19, 2016 17:02
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Knyteguy posted:My only experience with odesk was a small project where I charged $120, and ended up doing like 13 hours of work. This was pre-my job, but yeah I just can't put in that time for that kind of return. However I will take a look again. I just signed up for one of them again in the past few months. I've gotten stuck with some jobs that I put in way too much work for the money, but I got better sniffing out details before I jump in. I'm not recommending that. I feel like you should be able to maybe find some local businesses (not unlike that crazy boss who offered you a job) where they could maybe use some work done but can't justify a full-time employee. I dunno, maybe post up on craigslist or something as programmer for hire, you might find some small stuff to get started. At the very least you can use it as resume building and experience in different use cases / industries. In the best case, you may get some good contacts with some recurring work on the side.
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Apr 19, 2016 18:23
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Knyteguy posted:That's unfair. I was advised to turn down two jobs in the past 8 months that came with $15,000/yr raises by the thread. And that really was without much trying. Yea, but you would have taken them if they made sense. You're not a martyr because we told you the job's didn't seem like a good fit, you made the final choice and they were anything but a no-brainer. You don't need to defend your programming skills to anyone around here, earlier in the job search you were a self-proclaimed jr. developer so that's just what people are remembering. Of course you're getting better, you're just not sr. programmer at <big SV company> right now. No need to get on the defensive.
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Apr 20, 2016 17:19
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Not to mention if KG's ultimate goal is to be a "Sr. programmer who could get a job at any facetwitoogle" he'll need to work for a decent-sized company with a decent amount of devs. I'm all about small business, too, but you're not going to get learn the team-skills those companies are going to want if you're the sole developer for a company.
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May 9, 2016 21:24
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To me, it seems that the underlying theme of your new freedom kick is the same conflict as always in your thread, it boils down to you not thinking you have enough discretionary money to have the freedom to do and buy what you'd like. And why don't you have the money to do what you'd like? You spent money you didn't have in the past or you spend money in the present unwisely (smoking, breaking leases to move, speeding ticket(s)) or you're just not preparing for expenses well enough. I'm not claiming that you aren't making progress, because you are. I just think you're unhappy because you think "I make twice what I used to, but now I have all these responsibilities and I can't do fun stuff". I don't know what to tell you, you have a kid and a wife and debt repayment and finite resources. It's a simple math formula with no cheat codes. You have enough money to make steady progress, but that's not "fun". It seems to me like you're a dreamer. You have no problems coming up with the "what would be really awesome is if...." ideas with little to no planning and follow through. I have those moments constantly, but I'm firmly rooted in reality (or risk averse or really boring or whatever) and bring myself back. My wife and I make a solid middle class living, probably around the same as you and your wife. But since our poo poo has been together for quite a while, we can afford our modest house with a 15 year mortgage, have our kids in daycare, save modestly for retirement / kid's education, and still have money to do some fun things with. Sure, I would love to buy a new truck and ATV and shed and renovate our kitchen and basement and add on to our back porch and new windows and siding and a detached garage. And we could do some of those right now, with cash, but that's not our plan and we might end up where we don't want to be because of one of those bad decisions. A couple of months ago when you came back in earnest wanting to do better I argued that your "big pile of discretionary" money was not the way to do it, though I said it it works for you that's fine. While it certainly makes things more flexible for you, it's going to be much easier to kick you in the balls when you have multiple of these random expenses in a couple months time. You're not going to have any "you" money left over and you're going to feel resentful and pouty and helpless. I've said it many times but I think careful planning is the best stress-reducer I've had personally, it let's me know exactly where we're at and what we can afford to do and what we can't afford to do. We're by no means perfect and unexpected things still come up, but that just means we'll be better prepared for it next time. It gives real, tangible data instead of projecting "well if we save all of our discretionary budget throughout the year, we can buy a house AND an RV!!!"
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May 23, 2016 15:19
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How are you going to code on a laptop? I mean, that's like the worst thing imaginable for a developer.
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May 24, 2016 12:48
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